Another Year Over - One thing I learned..

As another year ends, I am happily looking into the next one. A couple of things I do every year on this first day of summer break is look back at what went well in my classroom and what didn't, and what am I going to add or do different next year. Looking back at what went well, I feel that I've learned more about my students this year. I really opened up my classroom to conversations about their activities outside the classroom. Sometimes this can be very eye opening, but other times it was very educational for me. When we discussed articles I'd read about myspace.com the conversation was truly a case of me learning from them. I knew nothing about the site until this year. I asked them about it, and I checked out some of their profiles. It was amazing the contrast between what I read in USA Today vs. what the students were telling me about the site. The end result was that I understood what the hype was all about from both sides. The site has its pitfalls, and in some cases my students knew them better than any of the articles I shared with them. they also gave me the impression that they knew exactly what they were doing. I tried hard to encourage them to use mySpace as a social outlet but not to expose themselves to predators. I also advised them that whatever is said on that site can be viewed by college recruiters or potential employers, even school administrators and police officers. We had one incident at our school this year where a student explained in detail the steps on how to get another student's classwork through the school's network. He was suspended and kicked out of his computer classes at our school which almost prevented him from graduating. These types of discussions were beneficial to me (I learned a lot), and I hope some of it sunk in with the students as well. From some of the immediate feedback I got in class I'm thinking it did. When I look forward to next year I have some ideas for more web2.0 based activities for my classes. In my AP Computer Science class this year we made our own vlog on current tech trends, (ok we imitated RocketBoom), but it was fun and the students enjoyed writing their news articles for our two chosen anchor people. Next year maybe we could put together a couple of episodes in my webpage design classes the possibilities are endless.

Two conferences I wanted to attend this summer are coming up soon, the Building Learning communities Conference in Boston, and the NECC in San Diego. I was going to try to get to one of them, but my schedule is full. I will just have to read about them both in blogs from all of you other lucky educators out there that are attending. I hope that the attendees of those two conferences and others as well will come back and share everything they've learned with their fellow teachers and administrators.

Have a great summer teachers and educators. Time for me to go add photos to my flickr.

Tags: myspace, myspace,education, teaching, blogging, edublog, teacher, blog, blogs, Thomas Fitzgerald, David Warlick